Awareness of When Your Talent/Strength Turns into a Weakness

Posted on: July 5, 2015

Last Thursday, the project team members that had finished their part of the project came for their last weekly team huddle. We went around the room and each team member had the opportunity to share a final ‘highlight and/or hitch’ – something that had gone well during the project so far and/or something that hadn’t.

For context, my role on the project team is to challenge the team to reach higher, contribute collaboration tools and be the team booster rocket.

When my turn came, I shared that my highlight was receiving feedback from others on the project team when they sensed we had done all we could do with collaboration (using collaboration tools) on the project to increase team performance without crossing the line and exasperating folks.

In other words, we had made the number of behavioral changes possible with this particular team on this project and to the degree each behavior could improve without starting to produce negative results.

Any talent can be overdone. If you have awareness of where the line is with the help of feedback from others that have talents different from your own, your effectiveness using your talents is heightened.